REVIEWS

P.A.L.
Modus

Ant-Zen

Posted: Friday, December 15, 2006
By: Matthew Johnson
Features Editor

Christian Pallentin's work as P.A.L. has helped to define the genre of power noise, filling dance floors with the harsh but eminently rhythmic power of such classic tracks as "Concrete Rage" and "Gelobnis," but on his first new studio album in six years, Pallentin takes a completely different direction. Though the minimalist inclinations and distorted drum machines are still in place, Modus is set to a different tempo, better suited for quiet meditation than sweaty club stomps. Though it's a definite change of pace, it's surprisingly beautiful in many places. "Delusion" is an extended ambient track, not the unsettling industrial ambient you might expect, but the regular soothing kind, and on "Playtime" harmonic arpeggios ascend a gentle hill of warm pads. Pallentin also makes exceptional use of samples to get his points across; although the Agent Smith monologue from The Matrix seems like an easy choice, it fits in well on "Agentenfister," which Pallentin wrote to celebrate his resignation from a particularly miserable day job. Even better is "Flood," which creates a wonderful sense of impending disaster by layering crowd control attempts from a late '60s music festival over slow, ominous rhythm, and "Artist," which layers Philip Seymour Hoffman's wonderful rant about rock 'n' roll from the film Almost Famous over a droning distorted loop of echoing guitar. "Gone" creates a sense of nostalgia with soft, vaguely jazzy chords, gentle beats, and Hunter S. Thompson (as played by Johnny Depp in the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) reminiscing about the San Francisco counterculture, while "Do Nothing" finishes things off with a more chaotic ambient collage that derives a sense of vague existential dread thanks to some well-placed samples from Jim Jarmusch's avant-garde jailbreak film, Down by Law. No longer content to merely assault your senses on the dance floor, Pallentin seems to have been doing a lot of thinking over the past few years, and Modus is his most philosophical album by far.